Agriculture is self-evident, we need food on a daily basis to live. I don’t need three square microprocessors a day.
You don’t want to wait many years to tool up to make chips that go in weapons, either.
Else, you risk being structurally defeated very early, and this leads to others concluding that they can take you on. It undermines other preparations.
Producing chips and agricultural goods are fundamentally different, starting with limits like climate, seasonality, and land. At most, you could compare it to mining minerals for chip production
It's more to do with similarities in the consequences of not have any local supply in times of emergency.
A. How bad is the consequence of not having them?
B. How long does it take to tool up domestic production if there's a supply disruption?
C. How long can you tolerate the shortage of them?
D. How easy is it for a disruption or disaster to disrupt international supply?
The answers to A and D are fairly different, but both are "bad enough" to trigger this kind of thinking. The ratio of B to C are probably similar between food and critical integrated circuits.
Having narratives as broad as yours, without any evidence and reasoning, is the fastest way to achieve Russia-level disaster with government monopoly in the name of “security”.
The only sense it makes if you want corruption at state level and to go on war with at least half of the world.
Good luck with that.
Hello from Moscow.
Subsidizing and protecting local production has a cost: there are gains from trade and operating less efficiently makes everyone's standard of living goes down.
But you don't need to go 100% into protectionism. You can ensure that you have enough domestic industry to
- better weather changes and disruptions
- have a starting knowledge and capital base to use to ramp up production if you have to.
Just having a few percent of domestic demand for advanced ICs covered by local production is enough to make the worst international shocks much softer. Critical needs can still get filled. So a certain amount of subsidy can make sense.
…but the USPS will still use machines with microprocessors to sort that mail.